Rural Poverty Analysis: A case study of a district of Nepal

In the developing countries, decision makers face difficulty in allocating development resource at the local level due to the unavailability of an objective method that justifies the allocation. Poverty measurement methods, such as consumption based poverty measurement or Human Development Index could be used for the process, but those techniques are difficult to apply at the local level because of the constraint of resource. Therefore, a simple technique to categorize villages in terms of their development levels is always desired. This research is an attempt to address this problem. It has used socioeconomic and natural aspects to categorize villages in a district of Nepal. 24 variables are used to design five indexes - poverty index, social index, women empowerment index, infrastructure and institutional index and natural resources index. Correlation tests are applied to see the relationship between income data and indexes, and among the indexes themselves. The result shows a significant correlation between income and poverty index whereas no statistically significant correlation between income and other indexes. As expected, natural resources index shows significant correlation with other indexes. Based on the results, it can be asserted that income can be represented by an index prepared from certain variables in the rural context. Also the natural resources index can represent the development levels: the better the natural resources of a village the better the development. These variables and indexes help to compare the villages; when mapped in GIS, local planners and policy makers can understand the analytical results. This helps them to compare the level of development of their village to the district and national achievement which further helps them in bargaining resources with the concerned agencies.